2000-03-03 04:00:00 PDT STANFORD -- In his last major address as Stanford University president, Gerhard Casper demonstrated his commitment yesterday to promoting the arts and humanities on campus, announcing a series of new funding measures he will put into place before stepping down in July.

Casper, who campaigned during his eight-year tenure to revive flagging interest in the humanities among students, pledged to extend a high-profile presidential lecture series for at least three years. Since 1998, the program has brought some of the world's most distinguished writers, artists, philosophers, dramatists and other scholars to Stanford.

Casper also said that with the help of the Mellon Foundation, he will endow 20 new fellowships for doctoral candidates in the humanities to help them complete their dissertations.

In addition, Casper has arranged for Stanford to offer an undisclosed number of tuition-only fellowships next fall -- valued at more than $23,000 each -- to graduate students recruited by smaller departments in the humanities and social sciences whose budgets have little available fellowship money.

The departments would be asked to provide stipends to help pay the living expenses through benefactors' gifts or other resources, Casper said.

Casper, 62, announced in September that he would leave at the end of the academic year to return to teaching.

He took pains in his inaugural address eight years ago, and again yesterday in his final "state of the university" address to the academic council, to emphasize the role of the humanities. Despite Stanford's recognized leadership in scientific enterprises, he said yesterday, "we must also assure that our world does not get flatter and paler, that the layered quality of life remains part of our life."

Casper ranged over a variety of Stanford's accomplishments -- as well as his personal disappointments -- since he took on the task of restoring the tattered image of a university that had been rocked by a financial scandal involving federal research costs in the early 1990s.

At the same time, he said, Stanford undertook its first major reform of the undergraduate program in a quarter-century.

He devoted a considerable portion of his hourlong speech to the defense of Stanford's policies in hiring and promoting women and minority faculty and staff, urging critics "not to lose sight of the progress we have made."

The U.S. Labor Department is investigating complaints of discrimination in the hiring and promotion of women and alleged violations of affirmative action law at Stanford.

However, Casper noted that over the past decade, Stanford has doubled the number of minorities and women on the faculty. He added that studies have shown that Stanford's female faculty receive tenure at the same rate as men and are paid equivalent salaries.

"There has been no glass ceiling," he declared.

Addressing the growing challenges of the new information technology, Casper said that Stanford has begun talks with Ivy League rivals Yale and Princeton that could lead to a collaboration in distance learning and Web-based programs in the arts and sciences.

''The university will remain attractive as a physical space," he said, "to the extent that the quality of what we do exceeds what technology will make possible."